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One of the characters in The Mare, Mary Gaitskill’s new novel, "gravitates towards pain". It’s a characteristic that Gaitskill has ascribed to herself and it ripples under the surface of all her books, most notably Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) and Veronica (2005), as well as “Secretary”, her 1988 short story about sadomasochism that was made into a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Each chapter of The Mare is narrated by one of its four main characters, but the voice we hear most is that of Ginger, 47, a recovering alcoholic and aspiring painter, divorced and childless, who lives in upstate New York with her new partner Paul. For the Fresh Air Fund, a charity that finds rural respite for deprived urban kids, she opens her home to an 11-year-old from the Dominican Republic: Velveteen Vargas, known as Velvet, who lives in Brooklyn with her little brother Dante and aggressive, illiterate mother Silvia.

Gaitskill’s characters are evocative, too, and appealingly flawed

Velvet is captivating: beautiful and self-contained. When Ginger first sees her, Velvet recalls: "She smiled like she was seeing heaven." But Paul observes that there is “something unnerving” about Ginger’s feelings toward her, “something fevered, with a whiff of addiction”. Over three years, Ginger becomes increasingly obsessed, inviting Velvet to stay, helping her with her homework over the phone, coercing her to do better, and trying to protect her from Silvia.

The fraught, shrill relationship between Velvet and her mother is brilliantly drawn. Silvia is so defensive that Ginger describes her as inhabiting her body as if it were a tank. She slaps and kicks her daughter constantly – for talking back, for being wilful, for talking back, for being wilful, even, once, for watching musicians in a subway with undisguised admiration. But Silvia and Velvet also feels a profound attachment to each other, which is unavailable to Ginger.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

The plot centres on Velvet’s affinity with horses, and one in particular, difficult and damaged, that she meets at the stables near Ginger’s house. Velvet turns out to be a very talented rider, and riding becomes her redemption. (Her name is a nod to National Velvet, Enid Bagnold’s story of a girl who disguises herself as a boy to take part in the Grand National.) Some of the most visceral passages in the book concern the stables – mucking out, soaping the horses with mint, the characters who hang out there – and Velvet’s sense of liberation on horseback. "Being on the mare happened on another planet, someplace beautiful but with outer space all around it. I couldn’t even tell it to anybody. I was locked away from everybody."

In Lost Cat, Gaitskill’s wonderful 2009 memoir (in Granta 107), she wrote about fostering two Dominican children; The Mare clearly draws on the same experience. Dante is an entirely convincing portrait of a 6-year-old boy – impenetrable, unformed and almost surreal. In one passage he calls someone a "non-fiction bitch", which has the ring of remembered dialogue.

Velvet is captivating: beautiful and self-contained

The rest of Gaitskill’s characters are evocative, too, and appealingly flawed, but there are some stereotypes: the white, middle-class do-gooders who despise Ginger for playing at being a mother; their spoilt children. It’s difficult to sustain the inner voice of a pubescent girl, and in places the writing becomes a bit cloying and breathless. There is also a bit too much of everyone reading overt emotions in each other’s eyes: “I looked at him from the bottom of me; something came up in me and met him strong. Inside his eyes, he fell back.”

But there are many moments of poignant brilliance. When Paul’s affair with Polly, a colleague, falls apart, he thinks of Ginger alone: "I imagined her in the city, living in a grimy studio… trying to find a job (as what?) and attempting to maintain a relationship with a family who’d most likely have no use for her – and I sped to Poughkeepsie as if to forestall the future, Polly hurling away from me like a rapidly cooling planet wrenched off its axis.”

Gaitskill is a complicated and interesting writer, and a disconcerting storyteller – she is fascinated with the passionate and perverse, and the idea of the buried self. She also looks for the trapdoor, and Mare is about second chances – for Velvet, for Ginger, for Paul and even for Silvia – and if the ending feels a little contrived, the means makes up for it.